


The Unthinkable

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-11
Updated: 2011-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Aubrey waits on the HMS <i>Surprise</i> for Dr Maturin to return from a spy-mission, but all does not go well...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unthinkable

**Author's Note:**

> Rating: PG-13 for violence, Spoilers: None  
> Disclaimer: Characters belong to the late Patrick O’Brian and are borrowed with love  
> Author’s note: Grateful thanks to cj2017 for beta-reading (and for descriptions of the dead and dying). Thanks also to badforthefish for translation (and for not rolling her eyes when asked for “Napoleonic French”).

**Part 1**

A seagull’s cry hard by the stern windows made Jack Aubrey look up. He had been staring blankly through the papers on his desk for some time, and now laid aside his quill with a curse, the ink upon its nib long dry. He realised that he had been straining his ears for the bell, but a glance at the chronometer told him it yet lacked fifteen minutes to the hour. Eight bells, and he could go on deck to relieve Pullings by clear duty not inclination; the entire crew of the _Surprise_ might be aware of his anxiety but there was no need to emphasise it by appearing out of turn, and in any case it would be four bells in the middle watch before the first signal from shore might be looked for. The Doctor’s skiff was already over the side, as it had been every night for the past week, waiting for the lantern flashes that would indicate his safe return to the out-of-the-way strand where he had been set down a fortnight earlier.

The same fitful unpredictable swirling breeze that had startled the gull now brought a snatch of conversation from far forward with unwonted clarity, the speakers clearly certain of their privacy.

“Last rond-aye-voo but one, tonight, lads, and a right pickle we’ll be in if ’e don’t turn up, like.”

“’E’ll turn up, last gasp most like. Bad penny, ’im.”

“What’s got me stumped is why the skipper lets ’im ashore on ’is own. Begging for trouble, ain’t it?”

“Aye, well, he can’t order him about, not as who should say order. He ain’t his wife, is he, now? Not like you and lick-arse here.”

A raucous cackle of laughter, with no edge of hostility to it. Jack had always taken pains to rid the _Surprise_ ’s company of egregious sodomites, those who quarrelled with their messes or pestered the ship’s boys, but good-natured teasing and gossip – unfounded or otherwise – was inevitable in any ship, and the more inevitable, perhaps, because a good proportion of the men remained unconvinced of the unimpeachable nature of their own captain’s relationship with his cabin-mate. It was odd, Jack thought, that his people should be so unconcerned by the slander; odd, and hardly complimentary, unless one were to conclude that his supposed personal shortcomings were outweighed in their consideration by his leadership, his reputation as a fighting-captain, his renowned luckiness. And it was all the stranger because he had always pursued women at every opportunity, pursued them with the enthusiasm of one denied their company for much of his time, and had never for a moment entertained any other notion. Having shared quarters with boys and men all his life, he knew intimately their form, their public and private functions, their strength, their reek; and though he could admire their worth in battle, he could no more desire them than he could help gazing with evident covetousness at the women in port.

As for the Doctor, the foremast hands seemed to regard him with a forgiving eye. A philosophical gentleman might have ways as strange as he liked, did he but cure his patients’ maladies and save their limbs from certain loss, and though they might spread gleeful calumny about him there was more admiration than malice in it. More admiration, certainly, than Stephen received by land. At the last ball Jack had attended, back in Gibraltar, he had been unable to help overhearing one young lady’s caustic remark to another: “Particular friends with that horrid frowzy ragamuffin? La! Whatever for?”

Eight bells rang, and Jack pulled on his coat and caught up his night-glass.  Fighting impatience, he walked as slowly as he could manage past the Marine sentry and onto the quarterdeck, where he forced himself to attend to Pullings’ dutiful account of the ship’s state and to stand in apparent contemplation of the rigging until the lieutenant had left the deck.  Then, with an air as casual as he could command, he trained his glass on the coast where for night after night the signal had failed to appear.

 

 **Part 2**

The gig’s oarsmen pulled for the shore for all their worth, avoiding the eyes of the Captain, who sat pale and rigid in the sternsheets. It was the morning before the last rendezvous, always the likeliest appointment for Dr Maturin to keep and too soon for any real alarm; but the crew of the red cutter, sent to fill water-barrels from the mouth of a small river near Stephen’s strand, had made a discovery amongst the jumbled boulders that had sent their midshipman racing back to the _Surprise_ to fetch assistance.

Jack leapt over the gunwale while the boat was still a few feet from shore, and splashed over to the shelf of rock where the watering-party had laid their find, shrouded in sailcloth. The gig’s crew followed him, joining a ring of seamen standing in silence with their heads bared. A thin yellowish liquid was oozing from beneath the cloth, its smell indescribable.

Jack gestured to Bonden to pull back the canvas, but his coxswain hesitated.

“Ain’t much to see, sir. Five days, maybe, in the water, and what with the fish and them rocks an’ all, ain’t anything ’ardly left.” He considered his words for a moment and then added gently, “Dark hair, dark shortish hair, sir, but the face ain’t mostly there.”

Jack nodded slowly. “His – his hands?”

“Aye, they’re there. Reckon it’s ’im, sir.” Bonden unfolded the stained sailcloth from the corpse’s side, revealing bloated fingers covered in ragged, bleached lacerations and with several nails missing. “New injuries on top of old ones, we think.” He looked round at his shipmates and there was a murmur of agreement and sympathy. “Here and here, old breaks these are, sir, mended years ago.”

Jack stared at the discoloured fingers for a moment, and then stumbled to the edge of the rock and vomited into the river. He paused there for a long minute, kneeling, attempting to fix on a single coherent thought amidst the swirl, until a lifetime’s training reasserted itself at last: men waited for his command, and the body had to be dealt with.

He wiped his face on his shirtsleeve, turning back to the knot of seamen. “Uncover him. Let me see him. Then – uncover all of him, blast you – then he’s to be triple-wrapped, with one of those boulders sewn in at the feet.” The remains obviously could not be left to the Frenchmen’s mercy, but neither could they be returned to England in that state; they would have to be taken out to deeper water for burial. He bent over them, trying to see Stephen’s body in the swollen, twisted, naked wreckage, trying to remember how it had looked before the ribs had been stove in and the belly emptied, trying not to let his emotions show.

“Sir,” the midshipman piped up, “Sir, if you please, O’Riordan here believes he knows the right prayers for him, the Papish prayers I mean, sir. The Doctor cured O’Riordan of the m…” He tailed off as Jack snapped upright.

“Take him in the gig. Three layers of sailcloth, deep water, and ten minutes to say whatever damned words you please. Now, Mr Calamy. You have your orders.” Jack turned to Bonden. “Make the cutter ready. Leave those barrels where they are, God rot you. The _Surprise_ , and pull sharp.”

 

 **Part 3**

“Where do you come from? _D'ou venez vous_ _?_ ”

The young Frenchman was trembling visibly, his face streaked with tears and mucus. He had been found crouching near the water-detail’s discarded barrels and dragged aboard ship, since when he had wept pitiably between protestations of innocence and appeals for mercy. Very probably, Jack thought, he was nothing but a common thief, fit only to be flogged and set ashore, his proximity to the body mere coincidence, but he might nevertheless be compelled to provide information about the local defences, and his appeals met with unvarying sternness and repeated questions.

“ _D'ou venez vous_ _?_ The town in the next bay? _De la ville dans la baie d'à coté? Y-a-t-il une garnison là-bas?_ _Une garnison?_ ”

The lad was delighted to tell the Capitaine anything he wished to know, anything about town defences and garrisons, anything at all if only he might not be hurt, might be allowed home to his mother, a poor widow, your honour!

Having picked out what information he could – information that might conceivably be true, though clearly the wretched man would have told him whatever he wanted to hear – Jack waved to the Marine guard to take the prisoner away. “And pass the word for Mr Pullings.”

Pullings appeared with a promptitude that suggested he had been standing closer to the Great Cabin’s door than strict discipline permitted. “Sir?”

“Have we sunk the land?”

“Almost out of sight, sir.”

“Keep this course until we’re topsails-down, then bear away east-nor’east. At sunset we shall stand in for the coast, here.” He pointed on his chart to a headland ten miles east of Stephen’s creek, beyond which lay a bay marked with the location of a small town. “Both cutters, twenty Marines and twenty seamen, to be ready with muskets, boarding-axes, cutlasses or pikes at six bells. Volunteers, mind.”

Pullings’ eyes gleamed with the eager anticipation of action. “There’s not a man aboard wouldn’t volunteer to avenge Dr Maturin, sir.”

Jack tapped the chart and then cleared his throat. “It was not him,” he said quietly.

“Sir?”

“I do not believe it was him. The body.” He looked up at Pullings with an expression of obstinacy that brooked no argument. The corpse’s chest had been half-crushed, true, and with a great wound across it, but the scraps of skin left around the laceration had had no remaining trace of that silvery scarring from when the Doctor operated on himself in India. Whoever the poor wretch had been, Jack supposed, he had been chosen for his resemblance to Stephen, and left in the only reliable, accessible source of fresh water on that stretch of coastline, left for the Surprises to find.

“But… I do not quite follow you, sir. Why should the Frenchies do such a thing?”

“To provoke us, to persuade us to take the _Surprise_ into the bay for an attack upon their town and shipping. They mean to shell us from a hidden battery, here,” Jack pointed to the eastern side of the headland, “and sink or burn us before we can get within extreme range of their harbour. We shall land the cutters’ crews after dark, here, on the south-western tip of the headland, then run up and take the battery. Then we signal the _Surprise_ to stand in, re-embark and run up the bay to destroy whatever ships the harbour may hold and to storm the town. Have you any observations to make?”

“Only a request, sir. May I command one of the cutters?”

Jack nodded at him in satisfaction; his first lieutenant had never been a man to waste words. “You may. Thank you, Tom. Six bells, all faces blacked and rowlocks muffled, and inform the master gunner, with my compliments, that he or his mate will be needed to spike the French guns.”

 

 **Part 4**

Two hours after sunset, a file of men crept over the headland, their faces and weapons darkened with a mixture of slush and soot. So far the account of the _Surprise_ ’s prisoner had proved truthful, and a whiff of slow-match from the concealed battery could be already be smelt on the breeze, while the Frenchmen manning the gun placements were just visible against the sky. Jack’s spirits rose; any competent officer would have guarded against attack from the rear, but the single sentry on the small watchtower just above the battery had never once turned round.

Closer, closer. Surely now the soft breaking of surf on shingle could no longer drown out the Surprises’ approach, but still the soldiers stood facing the sea, their attention fixed on the single bright light in the darkness: the stern-lantern of the _Surprise_ , ghosting beyond the headland just out of cannon-shot. __

The last of the raiding party were in line now, forty men strung out along the defences in the moonlight, their eyes on Jack. He raised his hand, and with a howl they were away, a murderous unstoppable furious downhill charge which struck down most of the Frenchmen where they stood, several others being flung from the embrasures into the sea far below. As the French lieutenant turned and fumbled with his pistol, Jack grabbed it, tossed it over the parapet and brought his cavalry sabre down on the man’s shoulder so hard that the arm was severed from the body. Two or three musket-shots at fleeing soldiers, a swift pursuit, the thud of axe into torso, and the last artilleryman was down.

Jack glanced once at the cannons, where the master gunner and his mate were already hammering spikes into the touchholes and Calamy was waiting ready to set the cannons’ own slow-match to a blue flare, signalling to the ship that she could approach in safety. Then Jack tugged his sword free from the Frenchman’s body and with a rallying cry of “Surprises! To me!” he ran for the watchtower. Splinters flew from its fortified door as he beat on it with his sword-handle, but it was slow to yield.

A shriek and a pistol-shot rang out from the rear of the building; by the time Jack had dashed around, Wallis lay shot through the heart, bleeding his last in Pullings’ grasp, and the fleeing Frenchmen were two-score yards away, crashing uphill through the scrub. Pullings dropped his shipmate and started off after them, and Jack made to follow, but a cry from the back door of the tower made him spin round.

“Sir! Captain Aubrey, sir!” Bonden was standing there with something in his arms, a small limp figure, its head lolling.

Jack raced back, but he already knew, already understood that it was Stephen, dragged from the watchtower’s cellar, manacles still shackling his wrists and ankles. He was unconscious but alive, his heart beating with an unnatural slowness but just audible against the ear that Jack pressed to his chest.

“Take him back to the ship. Take the blue cutter. And get the surgeon’s mate to look to him. Immediately, do you hear me there?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Jack looked round rather wildly at the battery: the gunner was just spiking the last of the cannon, while his mate laid out a reel of slow-fuse to the arsenal. A few of the Surprises were still searching the watchtower, a handful had gone with Bonden to crew the blue cutter, and the rest had already joined the chase. Jack cursed and set off uphill after them, his steps guided by their yells and the crashing of branches. Further, further inland, the sparse scrub thickening into arid, aromatic pine woods, the way more and more impeded. A dry-stone wall barred his path – he heaved himself across and then stood doubled over for a minute, gasping – another hundred yards, another, and there they were: two men ringed by two dozen, and all strangely quiet. One of the Frenchmen lay sprawled on the pine-needles, the top of his skull blown away. The other stood up and saluted shakily as Jack approached.

“Your name, sir?” demanded Jack coldly, his breath still short. “ _Quel est votre nom?_ ”

The French officer – for officer he clearly was, although what rank and service Jack was not certain – stared back at him.

“ _Votre nom, je vous prie._ ”

Still the man did not respond, though he winced a little as Pullings’ grasp on his arm tightened. Jack was opening his mouth to order him marched back to the battery, when a brilliant sheet of white flame lit the night, followed an instant later by a shocking crash half-heard, half-felt as the ground trembled from the torching of the battery’s powder-store.

Jack’s ears were still ringing as he turned back to the officer, now blood-lit by the reddening flames and sagging in Pullings’ arms. Blood-lit, and yet not so – it _was_ blood, blood flowing in pulsing streams from a great wound across the man’s inner thigh, blood spurting between Pullings’ fingers as he tried to staunch it.

“I- I’m sorry, sir,” stammered Redmere, a tall master’s mate. “He threw himself at me when the arsenal exploded, sir, threw himself on my dirk before I could stop him.”

Jack nodded. “Had you searched him?”

“Yes sir, we took his pistols off him. He had no other weapons.” Redmere spoke without lifting his appalled gaze from the wounded man.

“I meant searched for papers, damn you. Logbooks, letters, anything?”

“There was nothing on him, sir.”

Jack nodded again, watching the man’s head droop. No one could survive the loss of his heart’s blood at such a rate; no surgeon could hope to stem such a flow, and there could be no pity for a man who had rendered useless the only surgeon who might have tried.

Jack raised his voice. “All hands to return to the cutter!”

The Frenchman was shuddering now, his breath coming in irregular gasps; his face, when Pullings raised it, was waxy-yellow spattered with dark blood.

“Leave him,” Jack said. “Leave him here to rot.”

 

 **Part 5**

The _Surprise_ had come as close to shore as she dared, the steady chant of the leadsman in the chains already audible as the red cutter shoved off from shore with the last of the raiding party. Jack dipped a hand in the sea and washed the blood and sweat from his face as he considered his options.

The breeze had backed into the north: tacking into the bay now would take a wearisome age, and in any case the little town at the head of the bay was of no strategic importance, had no garrison, and its harbour likely held not a single frigate or ship of the line. In his younger days he would have taken the gamble anyway, would never have cut his losses, would have fired the town for practice or for the pure love of fire; but he was no longer that reckless Jack-the-lad, and now that he had destroyed what defences the town had possessed and retrieved the one thing that mattered, the thought of shelling municipal buildings and sinking or burning fishing-vessels filled him with nothing but distaste.

Besides, it was more important that the Doctor be removed to Gibraltar or England without delay, more important by far. Jack had no idea of the extent of Stephen’s injuries, but it was clear that there was not a moment to be lost, either in obtaining medical treatment or in informing the Admiralty of the outcome of the mission.

His thoughts were interrupted by the thump of the cutter against the ship. He climbed aboard without ceremony, immediately ordering Mowett to hoist the boat and set a course for the Straits of Gibraltar, “as fast as you please, Mr Mowett, and never mind if a spar or two carries away.”

“Aye aye, sir. If you please, sir, Dr Maturin is waiting for you in the Great Cabin.”

“He is? Did the surgeon’s mate examine him?”

“Which he tried to, sir,” cut in Killick, who had sidled up uninvited, “but the Doctor don’t take kindly to meddling, not ’alf he don’t.”

“He’s awake, then?”

“Aye, and made to try and climb up the barky’s side when they brung ’im back, only that Bonden’d tied ’im into a bosun’s chair. Woke up proper then, God love us, and called for coffee, hot and hot. Ain’t hurt – far’s I can tell, leastways. Them French buggers give ’im some drug or other, but it wore off right enough.”

Worn off it might have, but it had left its mark, and the effect of Killick’s coffee had been temporary; when Captain Aubrey pushed open the door of the Great Cabin he heard a familiar quiet wheezing and saw Dr Maturin lying fast asleep on the cushioned stern-locker.

Taking the dark-lantern from its hook by the door, he tiptoed across to the locker, stepping carefully over the one plank that always creaked the loudest. It seemed to him that Stephen’s face was paler than usual and a little more gaunt, but peaceful too, and the breathing was steady. Jack ran his hand lightly through the disordered hair, tidying it off the forehead, which he bent down and kissed. Then he sat down on the deck, setting his back against the bulwark and taking Stephen’s hand in his, waiting for morning or for Stephen to wake up.

Five bells in the middle watch, and the ship heeled sharply in the strengthening breeze, set fair for Gibraltar. He would stop at the Rock for medical advice, whatever the Doctor might say; they had never finished watering, and that would make a handy excuse to call in.

He chafed the cold fingers in his own, feeling the familiar scars where old fractures had knitted. Then he raised them to his mouth and kissed them gently.

“Oh Stephen,” he said softly. “Oh, Stephen.”


End file.
